Two teenagers were in custody for allegedly plotting to carry out a Columbine-like massacre at their former high school next Valentine's Day, authorities said.The former Quartz Hill High students, whose names were not released, were arrested Thursday after searches of their homes turned up knives, ammunition, a gas mask and bomb-making instructions downloaded from the Internet, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. They were being held at the Sylmar Juvenile Detention Center for investigation of making terrorist threats, Brown said.... http://www.usatoday.com

Time magazine has named Bill and Melinda Gates and rock star Bono its “Persons of the Year,” citing their charitable work and activism aimed at reducing global poverty and improving world health. The magazine said 2005 was a year of extraordinary charity in which people donated record amounts in response to extreme natural disasters, from the tsunami in South Asia to Hurricane Katrina. “Natural disasters are terrible things, but there is a different kind of ongoing calamity in poverty and nobody is doing a better job in addressing it in different ways than Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono,” said Jim Kelly, Time's managing editor. The 2005 “Person of the Year” package hits newsstands Monday. ...http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/18/national/main1134754.shtml?CMP=OTC-RSSFeed&source=RSS&attr=U.S._1134754

Men killed two relatives of a senior Kurdish official and 17 others died in a string of attacks overnight and on Sun, piercing 3 days of relative calm that followed the country’s first election for a full-term parliament. The latest attacks, two of them suicide bombings, came after authorities eased stringent security measures put in place for the Oct. 15 parliamentary election and traffic returned to normal on the first full working day since the vote. A ban on vehicles was lifted and the country’s borders reopened Saturday, although the frontier with Syria remained closed. Authorities said it would reopen in a few days, but did not give a reason for the delay. In the northern city of Kirkuk, two relatives of an official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main Kurdish parties, were shot late Saturday as they walked near their house, police said. They were identified as Dhiab Hamad al-Hamdani and his son the uncle and nephew of party official Khodr Hassan al-Hamdani. ...http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10516456/from/RSS/

In his first speech from the Oval Office since announcing the invasion of Iraq, President Bush delivers an address to the nation tonight to point the way forward in Iraq, according to aides. The speech comes at a time when the president has sparked a national furor over security versus civil liberties. Bush acknowledged Saturday that on more than 30 occasions he secretly authorized the National Security Agency to spy on Americans and other residents and defiantly vowed to continue such domestic eavesdropping "for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from al Qaeda and related groups." Bush's unusually frank admission, made in his weekly radio address, came amid a bipartisan uproar in Congress after The New York Times revealed the secret NSA program in Friday's editions. ...http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/16/politics/main1132556.shtml?CMP=OTC-RSSFeed&source=RSS&attr=U.S._1132556

A family friend survived by jumping from a second-floor window as fire swept through a duplex early Saturday, killing a woman and four children and leaving her husband in critical condition. A neighbor spotted the flames just before 6 a.m., but police who arrived first couldn't reach the second floor because of the heat and flames, Police Chief Trevor Whipple said. Firefighters made their way in and were able to pull the bodies from the blaze. Kimberly Stoltz Foster, 30, and her children, Tory Stoltz, 12, and Brett Stoltz, 9, died in the fire, along with her stepchildren, Christa Foster, 8, and Mikayla Foster, 6. Her husband, Arthur Foster, 25, was hospitalized in critical condition. ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1417971&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

As many as 30 volunteers will participate in a bold experiment in an isolation ward of a Baltimore hospital: A vaccine made with a live version of the H5N1 bird-flu strain will be sprayed into their noses. First, scientists are dripping that vaccine into the tiny nostrils of mice. It doesn't appear harmful researchers have weakened and genetically altered the virus so that no one should get sick or spread germs. This is essentially FluMist for bird flu, and the hope is that in the event of a flu pandemic, immunizing people through their noses could provide faster, more effective protection than the vaccine that the nation now is struggling to produce. If it works, this new vaccine frontier may not just protect against H5N1, which is considered today's top health threat. It offers the potential for rapid, off-the-shelf protection against whatever novel variation of the constantly evolving influenza virus shows up next through a library of live-virus nasal sprays that the ...http://www.washtimes.com/national/20051218-012516-3875r.htm